WE’RE not going to be able to avoid Claire Foy this month, which is a very good thing. The 27-year-old English actor, recently chosen by PJ Harvey as her rising star of 2012, is on our screens in two flagship BBC series. In one she is very nasty, and in the other she is very nice. Well, very normal anyway.

The first is Upstairs Downstairs, in which Foy has already appeared as Lady Persie, the bonkers, fascist, Nazi-sympathising bad egg of the “upstairs” lot. The second is Paula Milne’s new drama White Heat, an ambitious saga spanning four decades in Britain that promises to do for its young, hip cast what Our Friends In The North did for Daniel Craig, Christopher Eccleston, Mark Strong and Gina McKee. This time Foy plays Charlotte, a red-haired, hot-blooded, middle-class feminist who pitches up at a north London student house in the 1960s.

“She is relatively normal, which is unusual for me,” says Foy. “A lot of the characters I’ve played are a certain way, at a certain moment. Charlotte is just a middle class girl going through life. She has a similar background to me and is even from the same area of Buckinghamshire. It’s terrifying playing someone who is very close to you. You can’t really do anything to prepare. I didn’t know what I was doing. But I’m really proud of it. I think it’s amazing. And I loved playing her. She is this normal, contradictory girl with the most massive balls.”

This is a typical Foy response: self-deprecating, a bit stunned, and teetering on the brink of hysteria. Interviewing her is a bit like running around after a puppy on its first walk. She is trying to take it all in her stride, she says, it’s just that it’s so exciting. “I don’t think you can keep walking around being in awe of what you’re doing the whole time,” she says, sounding like she’s lecturing herself. “You can’t constantly and forever be going, ‘Oh my god! That’s Nicolas Cage! Amazing!’ You just have to get on and do it.”

So what was it like working with Cage? Foy ended up starring opposite him in last year’s Season Of The Witch, her first foray into Hollywood. “Amazing,” she says. “He walked up to me. It was so bizarre. I’d just had my hair extensions put in and he came over and said, ‘I’m so glad you’re doing this movie’.” She laughs at this apparent absurdity. Oh, and she does a mean Cage impression.

It’s all a far cry from Foy’s first major role as Little Dorrit in Andrew Davies’ BBC adaptation of the Dickens novel. Foy won the part of one of the sweetest heroines in literature not long after leaving drama school. Davies said of her at the time that he wanted every shot to be “a big close-up of… those huge eyes and that wonderful straight gaze”. It’s part of Foy’s magnetism: one moment she can look like the quintessential English rose, all pallid skin and round, tearful eyes, and the next she is more odd, difficult and interesting.

“I’m not the most beautiful girl in the world and I’m happy with that,” she says. “It means I don’t go up for those two-dimensional roles where it actually says in the script ‘Someone blonde, leggy, and beautiful walks into the room’. There are a lot of parts like that where basically all that’s required of the woman is to look amazing. I’m not going to be cast in them. I’m thankful for that. I only want to take parts that convince me.”

So far, they have convinced everyone else as well. Vogue put Foy at the top of their annual list of the 40 hottest people for Little Dorrit. Screen International listed her as one to watch. Last year she starred in The Promise, Peter Kosminsky’s drama about a young woman investigating her grandfather’s role in 1940s Palestine. She has also starred in The Night Watch (also written by Paula Milne), opposite Benedict Cumberbatch in Wreckers, and as a vicious tabloid editor in Channel 4’s comedy Hacks. “I soon became a complete bastard after Little Dorrit,” she jokes. “I’m so lucky to have played someone that nice because the majority of parts aren’t like that. It’s a lovely thing because it means people presume I am actually really nice. And then they meet me and realise I’m a horror.”

The generational span of White Heat required Foy to play the same character from 1965 to the present. “I have to play 18 and upwards,” she says. “I do look quite young, which is fortunate, but I am going for older parts now. I don’t think I can get away with playing someone ten years younger any more. Mind you, I’ll go where the work is to be honest.”

Charlotte is one of a group of student housemates drawn together by virtue of being outsiders. There is a gay man, a black man, an Irish Catholic, an artist, and so on. “Charlotte is very politically aware, as the youth then were,” she says. “I had to get my head round the women’s movement and how radical it was for someone like her to go to university at all. I spoke to my mum, who was the first in her family to go to university, and it was such a massive thing. I take all of this for granted. I can go where I want, do what I want. I’m not blocked by my sex.”

Does she consider herself a feminist? “Yes, I think so,” she says. “I stand up for myself. I’m one of those people who like shouting about things. But I’m not particularly well-versed in it.”

Foy was born in Stockport, Greater Manchester, but grew up in Buckinghamshire. Her father was a salesman, and her mother brought up her and her older brother and sister. Her parents divorced when she was eight.

Foy never considered acting as an option, though she was obsessed with films. “I just loved Doris Day and Vivien Leigh,” she says. “I was in all my school plays but all my friends who wanted to be actresses were incredibly tall and beautiful and actually good at it. I wasn’t particularly.” Is she just being modest? “No,” she insists. “But at primary school I was more like that. Pretty bloody attention seeking. Very loud, hyperactive and excitable. I had so much energy. My brother and sister hated me. All I ever wanted to do was perform.”

By the time she was a teenager, she was clearly getting serious about acting, even if she won’t admit to it. She studied drama and film studies at Liverpool John Moores University and then did a year at the Oxford School of Drama. Not long after came Little Dorrit.

“I wanted to go up for Tatty Corum [a role that went to Freema Agyeman] because she was a very moody, angry character,” says Foy. “I was so flustered at my final audition, I couldn’t believe it when they called to say I’d got Amy Dorrit. I haven’t known panic like it since. It’s the abject fear of getting your dream job.”

Foy isn’t panicking any more, but she still seems blown away by what’s happened. And she is cynical about the hype that surrounds her. “I couldn’t believe PJ Harvey even knew who I was,” she says. “I was convinced she had been told to choose me. But it’s lovely. I just hope I don’t let her down.”

And what about being the next big thing? Foy laughs. “None of that has anything to do with me,” she says. “That’s what this industry is like. It’s a game. None of it is real and you can’t take it too seriously. But, still, you know, it’s amazing.”

• White Heat begins on Thursday at 9pm on BBC2. Upstairs Downstairs, tonight, BBC1, 9pm

Her luminous good looks made her the star of Little Dorrit and Upstairs Downstairs. As she prepares to light up our TV screens once again, Claire Foy talks to Gerard Gilbert.

Claire Foy is running late for her interview in the first-floor private dining room of a north London pub, finally phoning to say: “I’m downstairs”. “And I’m upstairs,” I reply, which is all very droll because Foy is of course one of the stars of Upstairs Downstairs, BBC1′s reconstituted version of the Seventies ITV classic about toffs and servants. Except that today the toffs are downstairs, or rather the cast of ‘scripted reality’ show Made in Chelsea are shooting an advert for the fashion chain River Island. “How exciting,” says Foy when she puts her head round the door. “It’s Made in Chelsea downstairs… I can’t believe it.”

What chance the cast of Made in Chelsea returning the compliment: “It’s Claire Foy upstairs… we can’t believe it”? Have they even heard of her? The difference is that while the solipsistic Sloanes are chasing fame for its own sake, celebrity is a by-product of Foy’s job. She is, however, the real class act in this building, a fact momentarily disguised by her munching a Danish pastry from a paper bag. “Breakfast,” she says between bites. “I’m lucky I have a fast metabolism… my whole family does… everyone’s got a lot of nervous energy so we burn it off.”

I’ll say. Foy is high-spirited, chatty and, I discover when transcribing my recording of our conversation, tends not to finish one sentence before embarking on a fresh one. She is, you might say, the mistress of the… And this might be more frustrating if the conversational cascade was not rounded off with a pleasantly earthy, self-deprecating laugh. She seems genuinely bemused by the fact that she has won several of the most covetable television parts of recent years, from the title role in BBC1′s Dickens adaptation, Little Dorrit, to playing Erin – the young woman investigating her grandfather’s role during the British mandate in 1940s Palestine – in Peter Kosminsky’s acclaimed Channel 4 drama The Promise. Journalists have even started calling her the “next Keira” and the “next Sienna”.

“I’m not being funny but I’m never going to be Keira Knightley,” she says in a matter-of-fact way that suggests realism rather than false-modesty. “It’s that thing of going (putting on a moronic voice) ‘the next… the next…’. I hate the idea of being touted as something that I have never tried to make myself be. I mean, I might not do anything… I might finish doing Upstairs Downstairs and just drop off the face of the planet.”

Before that unlikely event, and for the next two months, Foy will be prominent on our television screens in contrasting roles – as the fascist supporting Lady Persephone Towyn in Upstairs Downstairs, and then as Charlotte, a middle-class feminist in mid-Sixties London in the Paula Milne’s generational saga White Heat. In the first series of Upstairs Downstairs, which was set in 1936 and had the misfortune of launching in the wake of the Downton Abbey juggernaut, ‘Lady Persie’, the black-shirt, black sheep of the family, had an affair with the Mosleyite family chauffeur (shades here of Downton‘s Lady Sybil, who ran off with the Granthams’ driver). Lady Persie then turned her sights on the German ambassador to London (the real one at the time, but he’s not going to sue), Joachim von Ribbentrop. In other words, she is the Unity Mitford – the Hitler-loving Mitford sister – of the piece, and in the new series living in Nazi Germany.

“It would be interesting to see Lady Persie and Adolf Hitler around a table together,” muses Foy. “Probably she’d call him a stupid name and laugh and he’d probably quite like her.” Never mind Hitler, does Foy like Lady Persie? “You have to like every character that you play because if you don’t understand them then, you know…” she says. “Yes she stands for awful things, but when you read Unity Mitford’s diaries you realise she isn’t really conscious… they come from this privileged background where they were brought up in the country and their mum and dad were completely bonkers and they just say what they think. She doesn’t give a shit about what anybody else thinks.” But wasn’t that just the prerogative of privilege? “I am always so envious of people who do whatever they want. Obviously she’s not a very nice person, but I still think she’s hilarious.”

The snobbish Mitfords would probably categorise Foy as ‘non-U’. Born in 1984 in Stockport, Greater Manchester, in Stepping Hill hospital, scene of the recent spate of suspicious saline-drip deaths, she is the youngest of three siblings and part of a large, extended Irish (on her mother’s side) family. She moved south to Buckinghamshire with her father’s job (he was a salesman for Rank Xerox) and an averagely happy sort of childhood was only slightly discomfited, at the age of eight, by her parents’ divorce.

“As divorces go, on a scale of one to 10? I don’t remember a thing – so, 10, amazing,” she says. “My sister was five years older, so she got a lot of the… and my brother is my brother so he didn’t pay much attention either, bless him. But I didn’t really know what was going on. Or maybe I just chose not to remember, but mum and dad didn’t shout at each other or anything so… And we moved to another house in the same village so we didn’t have to change school or anything”.

Claire was the least academic of the three children, but her mother’s persistence with the schools’ appeal system finally got her into the same grammar school as her older siblings, and she mustered enough A-level grades to secure a place at Liverpool John Moores University to do a joint-honours degree in drama and ‘screen studies’, with a vague idea of becoming a cinematographer – “not realising that you have to have an interest in lighting people,” she laughs. “You should see the video of this children’s TV programme we made at university. It was shockingly lit.”

Foy was the only graduate from her course to actually go on and study acting – a year’s course at the Oxford School of Drama. “I wouldn’t have been able to go to drama school when I was 19,” she says. “I don’t think I was even conscious of life… I was like a zombie. But when I finished uni’ I just realised… just go and do it, stop being a knob.”

What she could not have foreseen was the speed with which she would “go and do it”. An obligatory episode of the BBC1 daytime soap Doctors and the pilot of BBC3′s supernatural drama Being Human under her belt, Foy was plucked, as they say, from obscurity to play the title role in BBC1′s 16-part adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit. “It was a bit of a shock… yeah, it was very weird,” she recalls. “I remember the first audition where I was sat with a load of ginger girls, and everyone was ginger apart from me. Rachel Frett, the casting director, was really plugging for me – I don’t know why. I must have looked right because I was not doing it right. Then the BBC do like launching people, they do like finding people who haven’t done anything before, and Andrew Davies likes doing that because then people think you are that character.”

Actually, Davies has said that he wanted every shot in Little Dorrit to be “a big close-up of Claire and those huge eyes and that wonderful straight gaze,” and indeed the enduring image of the series was not Andy Serkis’s bravura malevolence as Rigaud, or Tom Courtenay’s shambling brilliance as Mr Dorrit, but Foy’s delicate and very still, pellucid white face and big blue eyes staring out from beneath her bonnet – more Irish moss than English rose, and the very picture of innocence. It gets me to thinking about an often overlooked aspect of an actor’s fortune, one that cannot be taught or learnt, of how the camera responds to their particular assemblage of cheekbones, eye-colour and skin-tone. And when Eva, our photographer, says “I was really excited to shoot you – you’ve got such an amazing face,” Foy seems embarrassed. Is it difficult to accept that a significant part of your fortune is something you have no control over?

“I don’t know what you’re supposed to say when people say stuff like that… it’s just my face, I’m quite lucky to have a face…” In fact, Foy doesn’t mean this facetiously, because at the age of 17 she developed a growth – a benign tumour – in one eye. “I was like a Cyclops and it was all a bit scary,” she says, “and I was on steroids for about a year and a half afterwards that makes you put on a lot of weight and have really bad skin. It’s quite good when you have something like that, because the amount of time you’ve got to look in a mirror when you’re working… the amount of time people talk about your face… It’s quite good to have some sort of perspective, because it’s just a face.”

And of Little Dorrit, and the camera’s absorption in her visage, she says: “It actually set me up quite well because the director, Dearbhla [Walsh], said to me, ‘Your face is powerful enough to communicate stuff, so just trust that you don’t have to…’ you know. And less really is more.”

Less really was more – less screen time, more money – in Foy’s follow-up project, starring opposite Nicolas Cage in the Hollywood fantasy Season of the Witch. “A really bizarre experience,” she says. “Amazing but ludicrous… how much money they spend and the places where we were staying. And there’s so much free time. I had been doing something that had 16 scripts where I was in every other scene; this was one single script that was about 90 pages long and I was in about six scenes.”

Foy liked Cage. “I think he’s a real actor, which I was surprised at… not surprised but shocked. Not shocked but he really acts,” – this last sentence being pure Foy in its skittish circularity. “He’d ask me questions like, ‘What do you do in your life?’ and I’d say, ‘Well, go to the shops…’. People who are in that position don’t really do that sort of thing anymore!”

Does Foy get recognised in shops? “It depends whether I’ve been on the telly the night before. The Promise was the thing that got most people stopping.” Peter Kosminsky’s drama, in which Foy played a stroppy 18-year-old, Erin, experiencing a political and historical consciousness-raising gap-year in Israel, showed that she could do more than look beatific beneath a bonnet. The Night Watch, an adaptation of Sarah Waters’s Sapphic love story unfolding against the backdrop of the Blitz, saw her playing Anna Maxwell Martin’s girlfriend, while she appeared opposite Benedict Cumberbatch in a low-budget movie, Wreckers (“He’s a complete geek… he’s got more brain power than I will ever have so it just makes it so difficult to have a conversation with him”). And in a complete change of style and pace, she was the tabloid editor whose resemblance to Rebekah Brooks was entirely coincidental, in Channel 4′s spoof of the phone-tapping scandal, Hacks. “I should play someone normal,” she says.

White Heat, Paula Milne’s new saga following a group of student housemates from 1965 London to the present day (it’s already been dubbed Our Friends in the South) sees Foy returning to the more watchful ways of Amy Dorrit. Her Charlotte is a fledgling feminist, putting ‘This Ad Degrades Women’ stickers on London Underground posters, and falling into bed with her radicalised landlord (played by Sam Claflin). “If I never had to do [a sex scene] again that would be the best thing in the world because no one in their right mind would enjoy that,” she says. “You’re worried about what the crew are thinking, whether they’re really uncomfortable, whether you’re uncomfortable. You’re just thinking, God, let this be over.

“The Nightwatch was the first thing I had ever done like that and I remember thinking at the time, ‘When it’s on the telly I’m going to die’ and actually I really didn’t care. Because I’d done the worst bit of it… it’s not like every time you see somebody, people are going to think they’ve seen you naked. You forget it, you just forget it.”

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to her boyfriend, actor Stephen Campbell Moore, who made his name with The History Boys and who met Foy while working together on Season of the Witch. They share a flat in Notting Hill, and Foy is horrified when I jokingly describe them as the latest celebrity couple, British TV’s very own Brangelina. “A celebrity couple, Jesus Christ. I saw someone recently who I went to school with who was saying something like that and I nearly punched her.

“We did a job together – a pilot for a medical drama called Pulse that was on BBC4. It was quite funny because everyone knew we were together and [were] like, ‘You’re actually going out, aren’t you?’.”

“I don’t think I could ever do a play with him, however, because it’s too much. You’re in a room and you’re constantly being taken apart, and told to do this again and again. You don’t really want the person you’re with see you being told ‘You’re shit’ all day and every day. Anyway, he’s a brilliant actor, so I’d be lucky to be in anything that he’s in, to be honest.”

She may be being honest, but that last statement is baloney. Foy has already proved that she can carry a variety of ambitious projects, and being the sort of person that she is – cheerful and grounded – she must be very easy to work with. This month she’s taking her mother on holiday to New York, and is then doing the rounds with her newly acquired American agent.

Martin Scorsese and Mark Rylance are mentioned as directors she’d like to act for. “I’d like to work with directors who really make you work hard,”she says. “I’d like to be given a responsibility and have to live up to it. I don’t want to do anything easy because I’ve got the rest of my life to do that. Before I have kids and stuff I might as well get all the horrible, you know, self-involved stuff out of the way.” An actor with a horror of self-involvement? Now there’s a thing.

‘Upstairs Downstairs‘ returns to BBC1 tomorrow; ‘White Heat‘ begins on BBC2 in early March

Source

The Upstairs, Downstairs star worked with Cage on the film Season Of The Witch, and while filming on location in Bath, where she knew he had a home, decided to try and track him down.

Claire said: “I did walk around the crescent where he lives going, ‘Nic, Niiiiiic!’ in the hope he would open his door.”

She added: “He’s a lovely man. When I first met, him he strode across the car park and went, ‘I’m so glad you’re doing this movie’. I thought, ‘Oh my God, are you mad?’ It was such a bizarre experience. I couldn’t think of what to say, because Nicolas Cage saying he’s glad that I’m doing the film that he’s doing was just a bit odd.”

In the TV adaptation of Sarah Waters’ novel The Night Watch, the 27-year-old actress plays Helen, who is caught in a love triangle with two women played by Anna Maxwell Martin and Anna Wilson-Jones.

Claire confessed she found it easier filming love scenes with women than she does with men.

She said:”Anna [Wilson-Jones] and I had a scene in the bath, and the studio was so cold we actually stayed in the bath because it was too cold to come out!

“If I’d have been in a bath with a man I would have been out of it at every take but we were just sat there laughing, saying, ‘All right love?’ and having cups of tea.”

:: The Night Watch is on BBC Two on Tuesday, July 12

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Please DO NOT click to view the images if you haven’t seen the film yet, because they’re obviously beyond spoilerish! Proceed at your own risk!

Many thanks to my friend Annie.

GALLERY LINK:
- Season of the Witch (2011): Blu-ray Screencaptures

It’s been a while since ‘Season of the Witch‘ celebrated its premiere in New York but we hadn’t posted this lovely interview with Claire Foy on the red carpet before – so enjoy!

GALLERY LINK:
-Interviews/News Segments: Movie Files | Season of the Witch | New York Premiere

Season of the Witch was released theatrically by Relativity Media and produced by Atlas Entertainment.

Season of the Witch was released January 7th, 2011 and stars Nicolas Cage, Ron Perlman, Stephen Campbell Moore, Stephen Graham, Ulrich Thomsen, Claire Foy, Robert Sheehan, Christopher Lee. The film is directed by Dominic Sena.

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I’ve also been adding lots of foreign posters for Season of the Witch and high quality photos of our most recent events. Take a look at our last uploads.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Upstairs Downstairs: Production Stills
- Upstairs Downstairs: Promotion

She plays Erin, an 18-year-old visiting Israel for the first time. She’s following in the footsteps of her grandfather Len, a soldier in the British army in Palestine during the Mandate period who kept a diary of his turbulent time there.

It’s a powerful tale of love, war and betrayal, telling the stories of both Erin and Len – two young people caught up in the same struggle more than 60 years apart.

Here, Foy reveals her passion for the project, and explains why she’d like to burn every costume she’s ever worn.

What was it that drew you to The Promise?
I remember the very first audition very clearly. I got sent 25 scenes, and was asked to prepare all of them, which is what Peter does, God love him. It was so much work.

I remember reading a scene, and I had no idea what it was about. But then when I got the finished script, I couldn’t stop reading it. It was just the most amazing story.

Peter is just so talented, it’s unbelievable. Anyone who watches it will be blown away by the story. He somehow makes a political piece that’s so emotionally driven by the characters. There’s no agenda in it. It’s just amazing, it’s my favourite job ever, and I think it always will be.

That’s quite a statement.
It’s the whole reason I want to act. Obviously I couldn’t do a job like this every week – it’s such undertaking and it requires a lot. But I loved it; it’s about something bigger than just the drama. And I loved the character so much. There was so much in her.

She’s not exactly a sympathetic character, is she?
No, she’s not very nice at all. [Laughs] She’s quite unforgiving and a bit bolshy, a bit sarky, and a bit of a cow, really. But I think it works because she’s a real person. And I felt very strongly that when I was 18 I was a lot like Erin. I was quite mouthy, and sticking up for things I didn’t really believe in because I didn’t know anything about the world. She’s a difficult character to love, but she’s real.

Erin suffers from epilepsy as well. Did you do any specific research into that subject?
Yes. I had to. I had to have a few fits on film, so I had to be quite technically specific about them, because some of the people watching will be epileptic, and there’s a duty to get it right.

We had some people from the Epilepsy Foundation come in and talk to us and give is some information about it. And there are things you can watch on YouTube about it as well. I watched some fits, but it felt a bit weird to be watching them. It seems like such a personal thing. And I watched quite a few documentaries with people talking about what it felt like to have epilepsy, and how it affects your life. I think she’s so aggressive all the time because she doesn’t want people to think that she’s got a disorder or needs help. She doesn’t want to be patronised at all.

Did you do any other research into the situation in Israel?
Yes. I really shouldn’t have done, because Erin was a complete innocent about the whole thing and really naïve about it, but once I’d read the script I had to keep reading, because it opened a completely new world to me.

I got the job months and months before we started shooting, and I actually became a member of the British Library – which is very nice – and I went and found a book about a man who had written a diary of when he was in Palestine at the same time that the character of Len was there. So it helped me no end.

The series was filmed in Israel. Had you been there before?
No, never. And I probably never would have been but for this. For a country that’s so aware of its politics it was brilliant they gave us permission, because we couldn’t have done it anywhere else.

What did you make of it?
That’s such a tricky one. I don’t know really. It’s a beautiful country, it’s warm, it’s got lovely food, Tel Aviv’s an amazing city, it’s a really nice place to film. It’s a very metropolitan place, with a relatively European feel to it.

Politically, it’s not my favourite place in the world. I’d never been anywhere before that was in conflict, and I very much felt that it was in conflict.

Did you see daily reminders of that?
I did, yes. We were staying next to the US Embassy in Tel Aviv. The level of security is just astonishing if you’re not used to it. There are people walking around withy guns, and there are massive army helicopters everywhere, and fighter jets going past your hotel window. You don’t get that everyday back here. And the weird thing for me was you knew they were going somewhere. They weren’t just off on an exercise.

Were there any problems with people who didn’t want you there?
I think it was more difficult for us than it was for the actors in the 1940s scenes, because they were all in period costumes and period transport. But when we turned up in Arab areas and put an Israeli army roadblock in the middle of their city, people didn’t know we were actors.

It was particularly difficult for the guys dressed up as IDF soldiers. They had people coming up to them swearing.

So many people were so welcoming, and so pleased that we were making the drama,and filming in their country. But certain people I guess felt like ‘you’re coming over here to tell this story, you don’t know anything about it.’ That’s just human nature.

You’re known for Little Dorrit, Upstairs Downstairs, and you’ve got a film coming out with Nicolas Cage, Season of the Witch, set in medieval times. Was it nice to be making a drama where you were wearing contemporary clothes?
Oh yes! It really was. Costumes are costumes, to be honest, and by the end of anything, you hate them. I always hate them. I want to burn them all when I’m finished with them, I hate them all so much. You end up being really uncomfortable, really hot or really cold, the shoes don’t fit. As much as the costume department are wonderful, there’s only so much they can do.

But in this I got to wear Converse, which was a massive plus. But I’m so thrilled to have done a modern piece. So much stuff is period, and I couldn’t believe my luck to play such an amazing character, and for it to be set in the now. And it has to be good for me that casting people will see me not in a corset for once!

You’ve talked about how much you loved making it, but where does The Promise sit in terms of how proud you are of the piece?
I really hope people watch it, and I really hope they like it, and I hope people don’t get bogged down by the politics, I hope people just watch it for the wonderful story that Peter has crafted.

Little Dorrit will always be so important to me – it was my first big job, it was a character I got to play for six months. So that and this, for different reasons, have to come out top.

I felt so emotionally attached to Erin and so believed her story, and I loved working with Peter so much. I think every job will be different, but I think for me, creatively, and of the jobs I’ll be proud to show people, this is definitely up there at number one. It’s got so much integrity. All actors want to do something that’s good – something that’s pure and has no vanity, something they can be really proud of. Well, for me, this was that job. I’ll be so lucky to ever do a job that I love this much again.

Source

Huge thanks to Lorna.

GALLERY LINKS:
- Magazine Scans from 2011: Times Playlist (UK) – February 5-11, 2011
- Magazine Scans from 2011: Glamour (UK) – March 2011

I embarrass myself on a daily basis Particularly after I’ve had a glass of wine. All of a sudden I think that what I have to say is really important, so I end up telling people how to run their lives. I’m lucky that my friends know me well enough to say, “Claire, shut up.”

I feel very lucky I’ve worked in supermarkets, put tags in baseball caps and provided security during Wimbledon, but I never thought acting would be something I’d be any good at, or make a living from.

I must have seen ‘Titanic‘ more than 100 times Growing up, I was obsessed with Leonardo DiCaprio. But the line I always remember is by Ioan Gruffudd, near the end: “Is anybody alive out there, can anybody hear me?”

My private life is no one else’s business Isn’t it rather odd telling total strangers about the personal things in your world? It’s all still new to me, but I can just imagine my friends saying, “Cheers Claire, but I didn’t really want to be in the newspaper.”

I hate having to pose for photos It’s just so embarrassing. Everyone is expecting you to know what to do because you’re an actor but I haven’t a clue. I wish I had something inside me that could say, “It’s all right, just do ‘Blue Steel’ from Zoolander and everything will be fine.” Instead I feel I’ve let the photographer down.

I’m a bit of a granny, really I love home, any home really – my mum’s, and of course my own. I love eating food there and chilling in bed with a cup of tea. I used to live with five friends when I first moved to London; it was brilliant, but intense – I couldn’t do it any more. Now the best part about going out for the day is that I get to come home at the end of it.

The paparazzi need to remember their humanity To stop and think “Oh, that person is having a bad day, maybe I won’t photograph her” or “Do I really need to take a shot of her taking out the bin?” If they treated celebrities as normal human beings, they’d never go as far as they do.

I’m more mature than i gave myself credit for I’d expected a slow burn before anything big happened in my career [Foy appeared as Lady Persephone in the BBC's recent Upstairs Downstairs and her first Hollywood role, in Season of the Witch, came earlier this month], but the past few years have been crazy, and I’ve surprised myself by not behaving like a massive knob; I’ve coped quite well, though I can still be a wally.

Nic Cage is a massive star, but he still loves what he does It was amazing to see how much energy he had on the set of Season of the Witch, and when we all watched Bad Lieutenant [in which Cage stars as a drug-crazed cop], you can see there’s some of him in there.

It’s easier dating a fellow actor He knows how it feels, and understands that going away all the time is just part of the job. But it’s not why I’m dating him; it’s because he’s a lovely person, though I won’t tell you who he is.

I’ve hurt people’s feelings in the past But I don’t regret anything; you can’t. It’s about accepting that part of you that did it, and moving on.

Visiting Israel was a culture shock Tel Aviv [where upcoming mini-series The Promise was filmed] may be in the Middle East, but it’s a thoroughly modern European city, which feels so strange. And the heat makes the landscape feel so different.

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Claire Foy, 26, is a British actress. ‘The Promise‘ starts next Sunday on Channel 4

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GALLERY LINK:
- Season of the Witch (2010): Production Stills

The next installment of Paranormal Activity won’t hit theaters for a while, but a spooky period piece will keep you jolted in the meantime. It’s Season of the Witch, the film about medieval knights who transport a young – and possibly demonic – woman to her Witch Trial. And it’s scary / creepy / gross / all the things that make going to a big action movie with a pack of Gummi Worms fun.

We sat down with the movie’s two young British stars, who share screen time with Nicholas Cage and a lot of fire, blood, and dirt.

GALLERY LINK:
- Photoshoots: Nylon (2011)

Robbie, do you want to be Robert or Robbie? You’re listed as both on IMDB. Actually I’m Robert Michael Adam Sheehan. My confirmation name is Adam. I did pick it, but only out of the confines of the Bible. They went, “Look, it has to be from the Bible because they’re holy names.” Ezekiel doesn’t roll off the tongue as well as Adam, though. Or Barabus, that would be a good one, but he was evil in the Bible, wasn’t he? What if I was like, “I’d like to be Robert Satan Sheehan, please?” I’m from Ireland, obviously. Claire is from Merry Old England!

Claire: England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales! I’m from England. The easy one.

Lots of readers are interested in Hollywood. How did you get cast in this big mega-movie?
Robbie: I did a terrible, terrible audition! It was one of those things where they tell you that you have an imaginary sword and you’ve got to fight evil with it, and then they stop you and say, “Okay, now pretend that the bad guys are here, here, and over there and do it again.” I was mortified. But somehow they called me back, and I met Dominic Sena, the director, but we didn’t really talk about the film. We talked about his life in Hollywood, like, how he directed John Travolta in Swordfish.

That must have been interesting. It was, but I don’t want to get into it. Those Scientologists are always so lawyered up! I don’t want to get on the wrong side of it. I love you, Scientology; you are the new light!”

What would your Scientology Confirmation name be? It would be like, “Glog.” Glog Tron Sheehan.

Claire: I went into the audition, and I swear it was the worst audition of my life. I had to pretend to be possessed by several objects in the room, in an American accent. I was so upset when I left the audition that I almost considered quitting.

That’s so melodramatic! But I swear, I said, “Never again!” But then they called me back! Dom came over to England, and I remember thinking, “Why do I have to go to an audition on a Saturday?!” That shows you where my head was at.

But you got the part. But I kept thinking they were kidding, that they would realize they wanted a big famous American actress. I mean, why would they want me? I think it’s amazing that they gave an unknown, at the beginning of her career, this part.

Robbie: And from then on, I started calling the movie “The Claire Witch Project.”

What was your first day on set like? Dominic said, “All actors lie when they get asked this, but can you ride a horse?” I said “Yes,” but of course I had no clue how to do it. So that was the first order of business. Now I’m really good!

Claire: That was one thing that was amazing about this project, is that even though I ride a horse for like four seconds of the movie, we all got trained in horseback riding in Hungary!

Robbie: I was good! I was cantering.

Claire: Yes Robbie, you were very good.

You spend most of the movie covered in dirt…
Robbie: Not only that, we had hair soldered onto our scalps!

Claire: You were the worst. When I saw Robbie, we had to get extensions put in, and I was like, “Oh my god, I’m gonna die.” But it didn’t hurt. I couldn’t feel a thing. Robbie’s just a wuss!

And you had much more makeup… I had four months of mud, and dirt, and white face, and hair extensions. It was like, four months of foulness. It was freezing some days, and you have really red, raw hands. I can’t believe we managed to get out there every day.

Robbie: They served us lots of really good Hungarian food, I think that’s how we survived.

When it’s so cold and you’re on a huge set, how do you keep from getting nervous or distracted when they call “Action”?
Claire: You just feel it. It’s our jobs. Sometimes you’re so hungry, or tired, or cold, or bored, or beaten up, that you go on auto pilot. But a lot of times that’s when you get the best performance. The people who end up doing this job successfully can get to a point where they’re okay with not knowing what’s going to happen when the camera comes on.
Robbie: Somtimes it’s months of work and rehearsals, and you’re really ready for the scene.
Claire: But weirdly, that doesn’t make it any better, necessarily. I’ve been on set where I don’t even know my lines, because they’ve just rewritten them, and they turn the camera on and yell “Action!” And I just go. And afterwards, I’m almost stunned, like I’ve just woken up from something. And I think, “Wow, that was really good!”

Robbie: We came onto set once, and it was a forest they’d completely covered in fog. And they go, “Okay, get on your horse! Now, on action, turn the horse, and now you see this guy being eaten by wolves! And now freak out and go fucking mad.” They do it once, they yell, “Cut, that was great,” and then you go home! And you’re like, “Wait, I worked five minutes today.” But that’s part of it, too.

What’s your favorite scene in the movie?
Claire: Oh no. I can’t even tell you if the movie is any good, because I’ve seen it so many times and I can’t separate the movie from the experience of making it.

And next?
Robbie: I made a film called Killing Bono, which hopefully comes out in America soon! Watch for it!

Claire: Upstairs / Downstairs is coming out in America really soon, and I’m so excited about that. We never know what you get over here – now even if I’m on Skins you won’t know, because you’ve got your own American Skins!
–FARAN KRENTCIL

Source: Nylon Magazine

Proving that long lengths are sticking around for yet another season, the rising young star rocked the formal floorlength gown, complete with a contrasting sheer white upper body and statement black waistband – not to mention a seductive thigh high split – with an air of effortless elegance and a subtle sexiness to boot.

And teaming her look with black accessories, Foy certainly knows how to turn pared-down minimalism into one massive style statement – and with a slick of vibrant red lippy, this British beauty proves she’s got what it takes in the style stakes.

So keep your eyes peeled for this up-and coming-fashionista – she’s definitely one to watch for 2011.

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This film is rooted in the time of the Crusades. What themes in the film do you think are relevant to today?

Nicolas Cage: I think there are enormous parallels to be made in politics and religion, but I don’t want to draw them. I’ll leave it up to you guys to sort that out.

Ron Perlman: Very, very good answer.

What made you want to do this movie?

Nicolas Cage: First of all I really wanted to be in the forest. I was doing a little movie called, “Bad Lieutenant” in New Orleans, and it was very hot, I was in these tiny, very humid little offices, and I was dreaming of doing a movie in the forest. Then this script came along. And so I said I’m going. So I was in the Austrian Alps, which was divine, and in Hungary. Then I found myself living a dream because I always wanted to play a knight. I had been doing it since I was little in my backyard, but it took this long to put it to celluloid. It was my dream. That was really the connection. I like to keep it mixed up. I want to try to find new looks, and new styles of movies to work in because it has been thirty years now. I like to go into different careers. I’m celebrating the careers of Vincent Price and Christopher Lee who I was fortunate to work with. I like those movies. It is sincere for me. Those are the movies I watch, so I thought I should do that.

In the first battle scene the characters of Behman and Falson have a bantering that seems more of today than of the Crusades. Was that intentional?

Nicolas Cage: I think there was some desire on the part of the producers and the director to try to give it somewhat of a contemporary feel. Also to connect with modern day audiences as well.

Ron Perlman: It was an attempt to call attention to the fact that the last thing these guys want to do when going into maybe their very last battle is to call attention to the heaviness of the situation. To offset it with a sort of gallows needling. It is probably more in tune with what warriors do than allowing themselves to get caught up in something more negative.

Claire Foy: I think sometimes with period pieces people think that characters have to speak in a certain way for it work, and I don’t think that is the case. I think it is much more relatable to people if characters have real relationships, which is what I think all the characters have in the film. They just behave normally as opposed to “playing” a knight.

For any of the actors, do you do any research for a role like this?

Nicolas Cage: Well, none of us were really there, right, but I try to open my imagination up to what it was like. The hypothesis of the sound is that it would sound more like early America, the settlers here. Quite a bit of thought went into that. It was interesting for me because I was working with all of these brilliant British actors, but they were being made to sound a little more Americanized, where I was supposed to sound a little more European. It was a strange sort of sound that we all had to come to that sounded at least accurate in the eyes of the producers and the director.

Having not played a knight before can you discuss how you trained for the sword fighting in the film?

Nicolas Cage: That was very exciting. I really did enjoy that. I thought the two ways into being a viable knight would be the sword and the horse, and if I could get those two down fairly well in training then the audience would go along with me for the ride. That is also one of the reasons I became a film actor. I couldn’t figure out realty what I wanted to be, but if I could start making movies I could learn all of these different skills. I could be a boxer; I could be a sword fighter. That is always interesting when you learn new skills when you make movies.

Robert Sheehan: I think what was great is we were brought over for two weeks before we started filming, and they said, “You’re going to learn sword choreography, you’re going to learn how to ride a horse, you’re going to learn how to drive a carriage.” It was just like a gift of all of all these skills that I wouldn’t have gotten to do, or gotten around to do because I’m lazy by nature.

Ron Perlman: We had some great second unit directors. Kevin McCurdy was our sword master for most of the film. The fight that happens between Felson and Kay when we first meet was rehearsed over the course of about a month. He set a very specific style of swordplay. I have “Conan” coming out, and there are all different ways of handling the broad sword depending on what period it is, and what the cultural environment is. We had the Armstrong brothers, Jim and Andy, to choreograph the big Crusade sequence. So we were really in great hands. I think it was important to all of us to keep checking with them to see if we were getting it right because the last thing you want to look like when you are playing a life time warrior, a professional solider, is a guy who came from the Bronx.

Claire, did you do any sort of research into witches at that time?

Claire Foy: Yeah, I had an obligation to, I think, because it was something that everyone knows about. So I did do quite a bit of research, but my character wasn’t, in my mind, necessarily that clear cut. It wasn’t just a story of a witch. But it did help with things like the ways they behaved, and why people suspected them, the symptoms of being a witch.

For the wolf attack scene, how much of that was real and how much was technology?

Nicolas Cage: That was a scary day because I had a wolf that was snarling, a real wolf, in my face, and there was no one holding on to him, and I was only like a foot away. A few things did flash in my mind, that I was going to lose my face, that I was going to get bit, so that was a scary day.

Stephen Campbell Moore: The guy who was in charge of the wolves was called Zoltan.

Robert Sheehan: There was a point that Hagamar, Stephen Graham’s character, is attacked, and there was a particular shot that the wolves were biting, so he was covered in bacon and padding. He must have lost a few chunks of flesh in that attack because they were vicious.

This is a spooky movie. Did anything supernatural happen on the set?

Stephen Campbell Moore: Just my hair.

Claire Foy: It was scary enough doing the night shoots in that forest where you couldn’t see a foot in front of your face because they put in so much fog around.

Ron Perlman: We did some stuff in Shreveport – [looking to the Publicist] – am I allowed to say that? Too late I fuckin’ said it – and I got thrown out of the original hotel I was staying at… for life, and I had to stay in a casino hotel, and there was some supernatural stuff happening in that room.

Nicolas Cage: What was the reason that you got thrown out of the room?

Ron Perlman: It was so unsexy. It isn’t like I’m Kurt Cobain, or Keith Richards, or Mick Jagger getting thrown out of a hotel so I won’t go into it. I’ll just leave it at I’m not ever allowed to go back to the Hilton in Shreveport.

Ron, with this film and your role in “Sons of Anarchy,” do you like playing these combative characters?

Ron Perlman: It allows me to do what I’d like to do at home, but can’t. I think one of the lures of this profession is this immersing yourself into parts of yourself that you’d like to exercise more freely in the real world, but are not able to. You get a chance to live as that guy for ten or twelve hours a day, and work out some of your fantasies. The notion of why I have, of late, seem to be in this pattern of playing combative characters is more coincidental than anything else. They are just things that come along that I find well rendered on the page, characters that I find that are dynamic and compelling. There really is no other criteria for me.

Nicolas, you’ve been known to collect strange things in the past. Did you take anything home from this film?

Nicolas Cage: No, no, I don’t collect anything anymore. That was a different life. I don’t collect.

Do your recent financial issues affect the work that you chose to do?

Nicolas Cage: I’m making the movies that I want to make; I’ve been blessed that way. Necessity is the mother of invention, but I can say that every movie that I’ve made I have found it to be inspiring, and I’ve found something interesting in doing it.

You sport the long hair in this film, and the upcoming “Drive Angry.” Are you happy to be back to the short hair?

Nicolas Cage: Historically film actors and stage actors have always experimented with new looks, and because I do make quite a lot of movies I like to keep changing it up, and transforming myself. Whether I wear a prosthetic nose, or I decide to wear a wig in one movie and not in the next that is fine with me. I like to play dress up – when I’m working – that’s part of the fun of it.

Nicolas, are you going back to directing any time soon?

Nicolas Cage: I hope to, I don’t know when, but that is one of my plans. I really do want to get back to that. I have an idea, but I might have someone else direct it in the time being. But if that doesn’t happen I’ll go ahead and direct it.

After learning to ride a horse for the film, have any of you done any riding since?

Robert Sheehan: I’ve done quite a bit for the last year and a half. I actually lied to the director, Dominic Sena. That’s a thing actors always lie about. He asked, “Can you ride horse back,” and I said, “Yeaaaah, of course I can.” I actually can now, which I’m quite proud of.

What was it like working with a screen legend like Christopher Lee?

Nicolas Cage: He was hilarious. One of the best stories he shared with me was that he was in Hollywood back in the ’70′s, and it was the Thrilla-in-Manilla or some fight, I’m paraphrasing, but Mohammad Ali said right after the fight, “I just want to thank my friend Christopher Lee.” And Christopher Lee told me that everyone at the party said, “How did you get Mohammad Ali to do that?” He looked at them and said, “Magic. BLACK magic.”

Interview By: Paul Myers (aka EL LUCHADOR)

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Claire paired the shoes with a gray and white minimalist evening dress. A simple yet chic black hard case clutch finishes off the lovely look.

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Claire Foy styled her brunette locks in a loose bun complete with soft curls. Her chic ‘do was the perfect way to accent her sheer top.

Claire finished off her look with rosy red lips and fluttering lashes.

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